Protectionism is the belief that government insiders are better at deciding how trade should be structured than the people making choices in the global market.

Benjamin Wallace-Wells has written a piece about Robert Lighthizer, the U.S. trade representative during Donald Trump’s first term, for the New Yorker. It wonders why Lighthizer, one of the most prominent protectionists in America, is not part of the administration. One of his former aides is Trump’s nominee for trade representative this time around, and his ideas certainly have not left the administration.

Wallace-Wells does a good job poking at some of the contradictions in Lighthizer’s outlook and gets him to say some revealing things. He accurately describes Lighthizer as a Washington “operator,” someone who has spent his entire career in and around positions of power. Yet Lighthizer views himself as “anti-elite” (or, as the New Yorker insists on writing it, “anti-élite”).

Lighthizer does this by rooting himself in the Midwest. He was born in Ashtabula, Ohio, and his place of birth is frequently mentioned in the press as a sort of justification for his anti-trade beliefs, as though protectionism is naturally occurring in the waters of Lake Erie. This is usually dressed up as some kind of personal story about destroyed factory towns, but as Wallace-Wells notes, Lighthizer’s father was a doctor, and his mother attended college. They were not put out of work by offshoring, and they were financially well off, sending him to Catholic schools that put him on the path to acceptance at Georgetown. Lighthizer has not lived in Ohio since his childhood and was interviewed by Wallace-Wells in the Palm Beach condo where he now lives.

He’s able to afford that because, as a piece from Bloomberg put it in 2018, “after leaving the Reagan administration, Lighthizer made a fortune as a swaggering, Porsche-driving lobbyist-cum-lawyer for the steel industry at Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom LLP.” Many of the steel companies he once lobbied for, such as Bethlehem Steel, National Steel, LTV, and International Steel Group, no longer exist. He also lobbied for the former Indian steelmaker Ispat, which would make him a traitor to supposed economic nationalists if he weren’t one of their leaders. “Visitors to his home in one of Washington’s toniest neighborhoods are greeted by an almost life-size portrait of him,” Bloomberg reported. Normal, salt-of-the-earth guy, Lighthizer is.

If protectionism is the “anti-elite” view and free trade is the “elite” view, the paradox of Lighthizer is made even more apparent by the pro-free-trade source quoted in the story, tax economist Erica York of the Tax Foundation, who has a master’s degree from Wichita State and earned her undergraduate degree from the tiny evangelical Sterling College in Kansas, the state in which she still resides with her husband and kids.

Since earning his law degree from Georgetown in 1973, Lighthizer has worked in the Senate, the USTR’s office, and in lobbying, passing through the revolving door more than once. He was a fundraiser and adviser for Bob Dole in 1996. He has had, without question, an elite career.

There’s nothing wrong with that in and of itself, and his views should be judged on the merits, not based on his character or background. That doesn’t change the fact that his depiction as an outsider from the Midwest standing up for the forgotten man against the Washington machine is, basically, fake. Lighthizer nearly admits this to Wallace-Wells, saying, “I lean back on the fact that I’m from Ashtabula. But the reality is, it’s probably more to do with being a contrarian.”

The thing is, Lighthizer isn’t even that much of a contrarian. He’s a contrarian against economists, but he’s not an economist. He’s a Washington lawyer. And Washington lawyers love protectionism.

On a past episode of my podcast, Econception, I discussed this with recovering trade lawyer Scott Lincicome of the Cato Institute. You can listen to that conversation here. More recently, Judge Glock of the Manhattan Institute wrote for the Free Press about why protectionism is one of the swampiest things in the Swamp.

“Tariffs are managed by opaque bureaucracies and manipulated by high-priced lobbyists in order to extract funds from American consumers,” Glock wrote. Guys like Lighthizer get rich off of understanding how that system works and then playing roles on both sides of it, using their experience working in the government to help them better advise their clients who are petitioning that same government.

Companies beg for carve-outs from tariffs so that they can get a competitive edge. You can listen to a different episode of Econception about these carve-out requests, with former USTR staffer Ed Gresser, here. “The Commerce Department keeps a handy list of over 425,000 company requests just for steel and aluminum tariff exclusions in the last five years,” Glock wrote. “More than 200,000 such exclusions have been granted.”

A roughly 50–50 shot at success means it’s often worthwhile for companies to spend on lobbying for exclusions. This system also encourages a different kind of political spending: campaign donations. “One study found that donations to the president’s party made a company significantly more likely to get an exclusion,” Glock wrote.

This system hardly considers consumers at all, and they (read: you) end up paying the higher prices that result nearly all the time. But it can even backfire for the companies allegedly benefiting from the tariffs, as Glock illustrates with the example of Whirlpool:

Whirlpool’s lobbying expenditures jumped by a third to over $1.3 million in 2017—after which the government imposed tariffs on foreign imports of washers. A study found that the price of washers for Americans increased by about 12 percent. Dryer prices rose by the same amount—probably because washers and dryers are sold in pairs. Americans had to pay more than $150 extra for a new set.

In the tradition of reaping what one sows, however, washing machine companies were hit hard by the steel and aluminum tariffs that the Trump administration imposed soon after the washer tariffs. After a bad quarterly earnings report in 2018 caused Whirlpool to suffer its worst stock drop in more than 30 years, CEO Marc Bitzer complained that “we are impacted by the tariffs” that were driving up his costs.

Even foreign washing machine companies can petition the U.S. government for exclusions. Samsung received tariff exclusions so it could import steel to its South Carolina washer plant (specifically, on “hot dipped galvanized cold-rolled steel sheet that is coated with a high polymer type paint”). LG also got an exclusion for aluminum used to make its washers. One of the ironies of the washer tariffs is that Samsung and LG washers were cheaper for consumers than American washers. Which is another thing about the tariff system: It’s full of unintended consequences.

To read about a similar example with tariffs on the trailers that carry shipping containers, and the Americans who lost their jobs because of it, check out this piece by me from October. Of course, whether these protectionist schemes actually work or not, the trade lawyers always get paid.

All of this exists to raise prices. Economic sophistry aside, that is the purpose of protectionism, as Lighthizer freely admitted when he said at a conference in 2022, “The best way to fix consumerism is to raise prices. Is consumption really a problem in America?”

And that’s really the rub with Lighthizer: He simply thinks he’s smarter than everyone, including you. He told Wallace-Wells about one time when he talked to Texas governor Greg Abbott. “And of course, he’s smart and briefed and well prepared, but he made no headway at all because I knew the issue ten times as well as he did. Paul Ryan would call. I just keep talking as long as they want to talk.” It’s not just trade: Lighthizer also told Wallace-Wells, “I probably know more about tax than anyone going into the Administration.”

Yet Lighthizer said of his worldview, “I have trouble explaining this even to anyone senior in government.” They just aren’t as smart as he is, apparently. But then Donald Trump came along. Lighthizer said that when Trump asked him why “everyone” is against him, he replied, “Mr. President, that’s because I’m the only one who sees this the way you do.”

Then, they had four years together to make trade policy, and they failed by their own standards. They didn’t make any significant difference in the trade deficit, economists estimate that the tariffs cost manufacturing jobs on net, and the federal government had to bail out farmers harmed by retaliatory tariffs.

Lighthizer is undoubtedly a smart man, and he probably knows more about trade agreements than 99.999 percent of people on the planet. Does that matter? Should a smart person get to reorder the U.S. trading system? Is that a free economy? Is it republican government?

Distilled to its essence, protectionism is the belief that well-connected, highly educated government insiders are better at deciding how trade should be structured than the billions of people making choices in the global market. It’s pro-elite to its core and asks you, the consumer and citizen, to put enormous amounts of faith in bureaucrats and politicians who have demonstrated time and again that they do not deserve it. And it makes people like Robert Lighthizer wealthy for producing nothing except billable hours, government paperwork, and cranky economic theories that rest on the assumption that they are smarter than everyone else.